The Sixth Estate

A couple of months ago, in response to the Bruce Carson scandal, I began a list of several dozen Conservative insiders who appeared to be flaunting the party’s (and hence government’s) principle, since enshrined in law, that public office-holders should have to wait five years after leaving politics before taking a job as a professional democracy destroyer paid shill lobbyist. I’m going to continue the list, but in order to illustrate the links between the lobbying sector and politics, I’m also going to expand the list considerably. As I have made clear on several previous occasions, I hold a very poor opinion of lobbyists, who are in effect well-connected political activists for hire. The purpose of these individuals is none other than to corrupt the democratic process, by explicitly offering greater political access to those who are willing to pay for it.

Although in my opinion there appear to be a great number of illegal and at best semi-legal lobbyists working on Parliament Hill, unfortunately Sixth Estate and the Hill Times are standing virtually alone in calling attention to this problem. Literally — even the Lobbying Commissioner is doing quite a poor job, in one case appearing to have literally (primary school-style) assigned writing an essay as punishment for illegal lobbying. This site can only bear witness to the most public misconduct, of course, and especially to the ways in which even legal lobbying subverts the democratic process. Even if there are dozens more Bruce Carson-style cases in the wings, which I believe there are, there really is no way for me to know about them. Still, I’ll do my best on the revamped Lobbyists Watch page.

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I’ll bet by now you’ve heard that multimillionaire preacher Harold Camping predicted the end of the world this weekend — and that he was wrong. It’s been all over the world media, including here in Canada. What you may have missed was the report of the Australia Climate Commission, saying that this is it: we either set the critical policies for mitigating climate change this decade, or it’s too late. This isn’t a single alarmist report; one such major review of the evidence comes in about every week. Last week it was the Vatican. Before that, it was the British government. I will leave it to you to decide whether our society is well served by a media that covers obviously fake religious visions more enthusiastically than obviously real global environmental crises.

It’s almost too bad I don’t believe in divine judgement, because I can’t imagine a more deserving class of people to be sent to hell than the mass of journalists who think it’s more important to titter over a religious wingnut than to mention the continuing inaction of our government and most other governments on what, if we continue on our present course, is going to be a real apocalypse. It’s obviously not just because climate change is “old news.” Every single day that our government says it does not care that the survival of Canada is endangered by climate change IS NEWS.

The first reason, of course, is governments themselves, who for the most part are presently being run by leaders either too ignorant or too cowardly to acknowledge the evidence that is being presented to each and every one of them by their environmental ministries. And even these preening self-righteous power-hungry assholes are only able to get away with this crime against humanity because a frighteningly large number of Canadians think it’s more important to have a volunteer firefighter’s tax credit than it is to have a climate capable of allowing Canada to survive in the first place.

A couple of days ago I suggested that Harper would never allow a genuine democratically elected Senate because it wasn’t in the interest of the prime minister — any prime minister — to do that, and because a genuinely powerful Senate would pose an obstacle to the House of Commons. Apparently I may have been wrong. This weekend, Jason Kenney finally came out of the closet Cabinet, and said that if Canadians wanted to have elected Senators, they should make their provinces hold Senate elections like Alberta does. Oh, and they will also be introducing legislation limiting Senatorial terms to eight years.

This plan is not just rigged, it’s idiotic. First, the Albertan Senatorial election process is a joke. They elect Senators to a “waiting list” that the Prime Minister is allowed to pick from. In theory these elections happen every six years, but the premier can cancel them whenever he wants — for instance, the 2010 elections were postponed until 2013. Nothing forces the Prime Minister to pick one off the list, and nothing forces him to choose the best or most representative one, either What if Quebec elects 24 separatists — will Harper appoint them? What if Alberta elects 6 Conservatives — will a future non-Conservative prime minister appoint them? There’s no national laws governing the elections, nothing to prevent severe voting irregularities, nothing whatsoever except some contrived ad hoc provincial hodgepodge that makes the Florida 2000 elections look well-managed by comparison. We can’t govern a democratic country with informal occasional elections whenever individual provinces think maybe it’s a good idea.

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As you’ve no doubt read by now, the Harper regime has now fallen one short of Brian Mulroney in the race for the largest Cabinet ever. This has created the predictable wave of complaints about out-of-control Parliamentary patronage. Slipping by unnoticed was the continuing decline in Harper’s commitment to a promise he made back in 2006: that there would only be ministers with genuine departments, not trivial “ministers of state” and such, because everyone in Cabinet deserved to be equal. Everyone  from left to right seems disappointed by the bloated size of the Cabinet in Harper’s new government.

However, I’d like to go in a slightly different direction by asking a couple of deeper questions that the media is either unable or unwilling to. First, what is a proper Cabinet size for Canada? Second, what exactly do we want from Cabinet ministers, anyways? Our system works on the fiction that a couple of dozen people can run the country, and that one person alone (the Prime Minister) can make an informed decision on every important issue. This is obviously senseless. Back in 1997, Stephen Harper wrote an important essay saying that prime ministers should share power and that it was “anachronistic” to run a government like “a military regiment under a single commander with almost total power.” Now that he has total power himself, apparently he feels differently.

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A disturbing number of media outlets are reporting the Harper Government™’s announced re-commitment to ending the $2 per-vote payment to political parties as though the government is “ending public subsidies.” The media is doing a grave disservice to democracy by presenting it this way. Now, there are a number of exceptions, including the Toronto Sun. But the stories that went out in Postmedia papers, and another in the Globe & Mail, make no mention of the fact that the proposed scheme would cut only one of the avenues through which public money subsidizes political parties — as it happens, the one that the Liberals and the NDP currently draw more heavily on than the Conservatives. This has been mentioned in passing before, including by me, but I’d like to outline the specifics here as an important point of reference for people.

Now, as it happens, I actually see no problem subsidizing political parties. And all of the current political parties will survive the end of the per-vote subsidy — they existed before it, and logically they’ll continue to exist without it. Of course, in order to do so, it will mean they will need to spend more time currying favour with people who have the cash to donate to fundraisers, rather than working on discussing and debating policy options to solve the many serious problems facing our country, like the massive budget deficit, the future of healthcare, and Senate reform. Should politics be about fundraising, or should it be about reasoned public debate? The argument that parties should compete for funds like any other business is partially true but mostly false: not only is democratic politics not a free market activity, but the per-vote subsidy actually was the only form of subsidy that required political parties to be competitive in the first place. Conservative Canadians who are welcoming this move should have a good hard rethink about the implications.

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In the past, National Post columnist and Energy Probe propagandist Larry Solomon has only rarely crossed the line from odious personal opinion (e.g. young people shouldn’t vote) into blatant falsehood (e.g. that the United Nations claimed in 2005 that most small islands would be submerged by 2010). This week he ventured back into that unfortunate region, and I am beginning to wonder whether the entire Energy Probe organization (which Solomon writes for) is just a front group for grumpy old men with an inexplicable hatred of anything that doesn’t pollute. Seriously.

The subject of this two-minutes’-hate is Solomon’s idiotic announcement yesterday than wind power took another big hit this week in Washington state, where the Bonneville Power Authority has had to temporarily scale back power production from, among other things, the wind power plants. Solomon says that’s because during unexpectedly high wind surges, they have to turn off the windmills so that water doesn’t spill over the hydroelectric dams elsewhere along the Columbia River and hurt the salmon. Um, what? Unsurprisingly Solomon has missed a basic fact:

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Conservative insiders like Tim Powers and Keith Beardsley are emerging to lend some credence to the superficially ridiculous conspiracy theory that Stephen Harper is appointing electoral losers as Senators in order to build national support for an elected Senate. So I’m going to take it seriously too, although personally I believe that — at least for the moment — there’s absolutely no way that Harper is ever going to let the choice of who gets into the red chamber go to the general public. I’ll explain why, but first I’ll explain why Senate reform can actually make things worse unless it’s done right.

It’s depressing that I have to do this. If we had intelligent media columnists left, instead of brain-dead hacks incapable of doing much beyond chirping about the day-to-day horse-trading of partisan politics, I wouldn’t have to make this point. But I’ll make it anyway: Stephen Harper will never allow a fairly elected Senate. Either he’ll rig the election, or he’ll block it altogether. One or the other. It’s not because he’s decided to betray his Reform roots (or not just that, anyways). It’s because an elected Senate is not in his interest.

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The Fraser Institute has, you may have heard, weighed into Canada’s immigration debate with the release of a new report claiming to calculate the “true cost” of immigration. Unsurprisingly, they think that immigrants are a burden on Canada’s social welfare system (to the tune of $23 billion a year), and despite the fact that they can usually be found arguing for the wholesale dismantling of that system, in this report they come out as its defenders. As usual, the cheerful coverage in the media is a strong indication that nobody has actually bothered to read the report. Even the National Post shied away from actually endorsing the report’s conclusions, although that didn’t stop them from publishing a positive article about the report.

Now, as usual, I need to begin my coverage of the Fraser Institute with a few disclaimers. Before you crack open a Fraser Institute report, it’s important to remember that this is a group funded by the same wealthy American backers as the American Tea Party, which has taken tobacco industry money to claim that cigarettes don’t cause lung cancer, and which has an editorial advisory board which supposedly vets papers like this week’s Immigration and the Canadian Welfare State, even though six of its members are dead (one of whom the Fraser Institute appears to believe is still alive, zombie-like), and a seventh just happens to be the co-author of this paper. I have warned the anti-immigration movement about jumping into bed with the Fraser Institute before.

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Maybe it’s just Bell, but it seems to me that the WikiLeaks website has been having some trouble with bad connections lately — probably as a result of its new Guantanamo leaks. Moreover, although the latest relevant leaks continue to receive some play in the media, Canadian sites like CBC appear to have stopped updating their databases of relevant cables as they’re released. (They’ve done this just as they begin releasing several series of documents that have not yet been released to the general public, which particularly irks me.) For this reason, Sixth Estate is going to maintain a list of documents relevant to Canadian politics and foreign affairs at the Sixth Estate Watchlist. Note: this is not a mirror of WikiLeaks. It is a collection of documents specifically related to Canada, not a duplication of the entire WikiLeaks archive. If that’s what you’re looking for, you’ll still need to go to WikiLeaks.

Soon, I’ll expand the Watchlist database to include the rest of what WikiLeaks has released from the cable archive, as well as a number of other important sets of documents which are increasingly difficult to find online. For the moment, however, you can find links to around half of the WikiLeaks documents from Canada, sorted by subject area. As anyone who has worked in diplomatic history will not be surprised to learn, the vast majority of the documents are unclassified summaries of public news. The documents I thought seemed more interesting and, um, newsworthy are the ones that have been bolded. Also,

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This is a complete waste of my time, and yours. But so long as the media plays happy lapdog to Canada’s governing party by focusing on the Opposition’s antics instead of on the people who are actually governing the country, it’s worth keeping in mind the total scale of MP trips paid for by private sponsors from 2008 to last year:

As you can see, not only are the NDP not exactly the greatest leeches when it comes to privately paid trips, but the whole matter is irrelevant anyways — we’re talking chump change here. If you want to see some really expensive trips, check out the government’s travel expenses documents. Unlike the few hundred thousand dollars in trips our MPs got from groups they mostly supported anyways (Conservatives heading to Israel and Taiwan for annual vacations, Smiling Jack to Disney World to support unions), those trips get paid for with taxpayers’ money.